It's a subtle and imaginative product from the Bostwick Design Partnership, a Cleveland firm that has made a specialty out of designing midsize institutional buildings with a fine sense of detail and a unique sense of identity.

Other recent examples of the firm's work include the Agnar Pytte Center for Science Education and Research at Case Western Reserve University (2001), the new headquarters of the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District (2004) and the expansion of the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law at Cleveland State University (2008).

In this case, close attention by the designers to the facades of the Hearing & Speech Center, located at 11635 Euclid Ave., mark it as a special place in University Circle, the city's cultural, medical and educational district.

Shaped like a four-story cube with horizontal ribbon windows and bands of precast concrete that wrap the upper stories, the center at first glance is little more than an innocuous box, albeit one richly endowed with expansive areas of glass.

Look closer, however, and you see that the facades of the $11.3 million building, completed in October, are sculpted to resemble sound spectrograms, the basic analytical tools used to diagnose speech defects.

Shiny vertical aluminum window mullions and bands of concrete are divided into groups that vary in frequency and thickness to resemble the vertical striations on a spectrogram, which literally create a picture of the sound made by a speaker's voice.

Anyone with a hearing or speech problem (the two are often linked) will recognize the symbolism instantly, said Bernard Henri, the center's executive director.

David Joseph PhotographyThe Bostwick Design Partnership in Cleveland created a strong, street-sensitive design for the new Hearing & Speech Center in University Circle.While the meaning of the striations may not be readily apparent to the rest of us, they arouse curiosity about the building. That's very apropos, because a major part of the center's mission is to "increase public awareness and sensitivity" about hearing loss, deafness and speech impairments. Founded in 1921, the center is affiliated with CWRU and provides services to 10,000 patients and clients a year.

The relative proportion of deaf persons in the region from Pittsburgh to Detroit is high, Henri said, because many people with hearing difficulties moved into the region decades ago to work in auto factories. There are roughly 25,000 deaf or hearing-impaired residents in Cuyahoga and Lorain counties alone, he said.

For many decades, the center occupied a pair of nondescript institutional buildings along Euclid Avenue east of Cornell Road, directly north of University Hospitals' Lerner Tower, which was built in the 1990s.

When the hospital recently decided to build a larger cancer center along Euclid Avenue directly west of the old Hearing & Speech Center, it agreed to help the organization financially to move and build a new home, Henri said.

When architect Robert Bostwick presented the design for the center's new building to the University Circle Design Review Committee in 2008, panel member Ted Sande said the proposal could have been bolder and more exciting.

Now that it's built, I think it's clear Bostwick got the fundamentals right.

The four-story building is a strong urban presence, standing close to the sidewalk so that it reinforces the "street wall" on the ragged eastern edge of University Circle.

That's important, because the immediate surroundings include unsightly businesses such as a used-car lot diagonally across the street. The lot borders the sidewalk along its side of Euclid Avenue with chain link.

The center contributes to the sense of arrival to University Circle, whose boundary is marked firmly by elevated railroad tracks, located just to the east.

The site called for something solid and street-friendly, though not necessarily iconic. Bostwick designed the building as a contributor to an evolving neighborhood, not a stand-alone star.

It should also be said, however, that the building comes just a little bit too close to being a modernist cliche.

Stylistically, it's a variation on Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye in Poissy, France, built in 1928-29. That building, an icon if ever there was one, is a flat, square concrete box with a continuous band of windows, a ribbon window, set atop regularly spaced, free-standing columns.

The Villa Savoye caused a sensation, because it established dramatically that the facade of a building could be entirely independent of the structural supports that held it up.

The Hearing & Speech Center resembles a four-story stack of Villas Savoye laid one atop another like pancakes, with areas of concrete cut away to reveal a large lobby, a stairwell and first-floor meeting rooms.

Fortunately, the richness and originality of the facades rescue the center from being a tepid knockoff.

The mullions and bands of concrete vary in depth, which means they catch the light in different ways as the sun tracks around the south-facing building throughout the day. This gives the building a tactile quality, because it appeals to one's sense of touch.

The interiors of the Hearing & Speech Center are clearly organized and flooded with daylight that flows into offices, conference areas, play areas for children and special diagnostic areas.

The daylight is essential, because deaf and hearing-impaired individuals need good illumination in order to read lips and body language, Henri said. The clarity of layout and abundance of natural light are also important because, quite simply, they make the building easy to understand and pleasant to visit and work in.

In the larger context of University Circle, the building is part of a cluster of recent projects on the far eastern edge of the district, along with the colorful Circle 118 condominiums just to the east and the renovation of the Cleveland Institute of Art's Joseph McCullough Center for the Visual Arts just to the west.

The area is still raw and patchy. But with the Hearing & Speech Center, it's taken a very significant step forward.

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